The instruction sets for some modern microprocessor architectures include instructions whose behavior is context-dependent (for example, floating point vector instructions). A vector instruction (or operation) operates on one or more data vectors to provide a result, where the result may also be a vector. A vector instruction may also be termed a SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) operation.
It is desirable for microprocessors with pipelined and out-of-order execution architectures to implement context-dependent instructions with high performance.